AI isn’t electricity, it’s lightning

This past weekend, Melbourne’s night sky was lit-up by half a million (!) lightning strikes.

My dog freaked out and kept awake, I had plenty of time to think.

Recently there have been a lot of smart people comparing Artificial Intelligence to electricity. Such as this from Jeff Bezos in December of last year;

“These horizontal layers like electricity and compute - and now Artificial Intelligence, they go everywhere.

I guarantee you there is not a single application that you can think of that is not going to be made better by AI.”

I like this electricity metaphor, but does it go far enough?

Yesterday I read an article from Ethan Mollick, talking about the fusion of new AI models;

“A hint to the future arrived quietly over the weekend. For a long time, I've been discussing two parallel revolutions in AI: the rise of autonomous agents and the emergence of powerful Reasoners since OpenAI's o1 was launched.

These two threads have finally converged into something really impressive - AI systems that can conduct research with the depth and nuance of human experts, but at machine speed.”

His point about the combinatorial power of agents and reasoners sparked (excuse the pun) a thought that maybe AI is not just like electricity, it’s lightning.

When multiple forks of lightning combine, the result is literally a bolt from the sky.

As Ethan describes, we are rapidly seeing the integration of multiple powerful AI models and applications. The result? Shockingly good AI tools that can help us create new customer experiences, and deliver insane productivity gains.

The convergence described is that of autonomous agents and powerful Reasoners. In addition we now have Multimodal LLMs with live video (ChatGPT and Google Gemini), Computer Use (OpenAI Operator and Claude Computer Use), photo realistic image generation (Midjourney, Imagen 3, Flux) and high-quality video (Sora, Google Veo 2).

These additional AI ‘forks’ are also coalescing and allow the invention of new tools such as AI Agents for campaign creation, which can “autonomously” take a brief, conduct research, generate ideas and create campaign graphics.

We are still early in this convergence; many of the examples above are only weeks old. But at this pace, 2025 is the year they a) mature and b) combine to shocking result.

As with lightning, the outcome of these powerful forces can be positive (lightning can fuel our Delorian and propel us into the Future), and also negative (uncontrollable wild fires).

Unlike a lightning strike, we can readily harness this relentless energy and put it to work for us. This is at the core of what we do at Time Under Tension. If you’re after strikingly good ideas and outcomes from your generative AI initiatives, please get in touch.